~ is half way round the world before truth has got his boots on.

Category Archives: Politics

I found this e-mail in my inbox: obviously, I got on some IS mailing list by accident. I think this guy used to run their European Branch from Syria.

Memo:

Subject: European bombing campaign

Status: Top Secret

From: al-Shami

To: External Ops Council Members

Date: 8-Shawwal-1435 (08-04-2014)

As-salāmu ʿalaykum,

ISIS is settling in to a good few years of European bombing campaigns. I thought I’d save PR a few minutes. The boys from Raqqa are welcome to copy and paste a few excuses for the latest atrocity. Stop the War contacts may consider several hundred words around these themes with the usual stuff – Sykes-Picot, Balfour Declaration, western guilt, blah, blah, blah. Allah (pbuh) willing, we’ll bomb the countries below. But hey, beyond, Muslim ghettoization, mental illness, naff jails and intimidation by the spooks there are always grounds besides killing them all wherever you find them. (pbuh! Lol!)

When we suicide bomb the following countries, this is the line. Cc. all IS and StW – and Simon Jenkins – oh, and Peter Hitchens. (Any other suggestions?). (Apart from the mass-murder quotations from the Koran or the Hadith). For administrative purposes, we present Europe in alphabetical order.

Decapitate a few Albanians – the ‘Tirana, sore as necks’ op – point out that it was the only European country occupied by the Nazis ending up with more Jews at the end of WW2 than at the start. Unacceptable. Obviously. Duuurrhh!

Blow a few Andorrans to bits, and here’s the rub. Payback for 5,000 of the imperialist bastards bigging up Charlemagne in 788 (171 Islamic Calendar) in his ruck with the lads in the Vall de Carol. In Andorra.

Another Armenian genocide is a good idea. To encourage the others, as the old Islamophobe, Voltaire, used to say. Let’s have a few more of ‘em enslaved in our army. Just like the Ottoman Empire used to do. (Too serious? Tone?)

Austrian infidels stopped us conquering Europe at the gates of Vienna in 1683. Unforfuckingiveable. We never forget. (Won’t take comments on tone. This one’s serious).

Azerbaijani oil burning is gonna be apocalyptic: who founded the Caspian and Black Sea Oil Industry and Trade Society in 1883? The Rothschilds. Jews. Need I say more?

Run a truck down a Belarus High Street. The only country to jail a newspaper editor for publishing the Danish cartoons of Prophet Mohammed (pbu etc.). That’s our job. How dare they? (To discuss: maybe go easy on infidels doing our job for us? Come prepared with well-attested hadith, brothers. OTOH…jail?: bit liberal).

Belgian kufr. In 1974, they recognized Islam as one of the subsidized religions in Belgium. One of…? ONE OF…? Lob a Walloon off a roof-top.

Bosnian apostates: not acceptable. Too many Christianized after the Ottoman Empire was thrown out. Munafiq for youse lot: the kindling for the fires of hell. In the meantime we’ll help you along the way. Into the cage. Fire!

Bulgaria: this land is our land, as Woody Guthrie said. 5 centuries of Ottoman rule down the pan after the Russo-Turkish war. Choice: slavery, super-tax or a knife to the gizzard. (Video?)

Let’s bomb a few Croatian tweenies: settlement for all those Ottoman Croatian Pashas. Splitters.

Let’s rape a few Cypriots: the Prophet’s (pbuh) aunt fell off her mule and died there. Murdering bastards.

Wikipedia tells me that,” traditionally, influence of Islam on culture of Czech lands has been small.” This has to change. Bomb the Islamophobes.

(Discussion document: for Shura Council eyes only. Comments welcomed on excuses, pretexts, reasons). Remember, brothers, if you can’t think of a cover story, scripture will always provide. The brothers will provide alibis for Euro (E.) countries beginning with letters D to Z. Please come prepared with drafts for all countries. For list of E. states, Google is your friend.

I have a memory that Marx once said that all his work was a footnote to Rousseau. Reading, D.J. Taylor’s ‘Orwell The Life’, I could conceive that all western political and moral thought is a footnote to Orwell: or rather a conversation with him.

Whether or not Marx said it I don’t know and have never bothered to find out. In much the same way, it is some 30 years since I read most of Orwell, his novels, essays and journalism, yet he remains, at least to me, the slave whispering in the triumphant Roman General’s ear, “Remember, you are mortal.”

We describe as ‘Orwellian’ any régime or movement of political terror which induces a dazed, mute numbness in its victim. It is a cliché which the best, and sometimes the worst, writers avoid. Yet the problem with them is that they are often true, just as stereotypes can be. Indeed, that benoughted destruction of resolve has another Orwellian sense: in 1937 we see his first wife Eileen in Barcelona abstracted from her ability to think by the menace of the Communist Party.

However much the ‘Orwellian’ epithet resonates around public discourse, one is reminded of one’s core impression of the man as in a most awkward way plain honest. His criticisms would not baulk at political or moral inconvenience. If one could compare the methods of the CP and Fascists, then it wasn’t decent to overlook the CP’s crimes; and of course it meant that they shared some mind-set. One thinks of the minute flaring of Orwell’s nostrils as he observed the grime-strewn floors of his working-class hosts in ‘The Road to Wigan Pier’. Did he recall his Burmese days when he chucked his fag butts around his living-room? Still, to marmalize the spirit of a people is not the same as inattention to the chores.

It was Orwell who pointed out, a tad embarrassingly for the head of the British CP in the 30s, Harry Pollitt, one of a long line of UK Stalinists who sound as if they formed part of a Middlesbrough centre-back partnership, that slatternliness could be ouvrierist: as if Marx was slapping his party descendants in the face with his favourite, and Terentian, aphorism, “Nothing human is alien to me” – or you or anyone.

If Terence and that anonymous Roman slave could susurrate our little and big temptations, surely Orwell was on to something when he spotted that obscure writers and clever proles, if unchecked, could transform a righteous battle into a Triumph of the Will. Christendom, smithereened by the Great War, fell to strong men, mini-gods of weedy totalitarianisms which lasted only from 12 to 72 years, naked apes who befoul drains just like the Wigan proletariat. Their Palme Dutts did not stamp on our faces forever but they did substitute the worship of God with that of a set of commonplace humans, often festooned in martial paraphernalia hinting at the loving God’s reversion to Yahwist psychopathy. Hitler, Stalin, Franco, Mussolini.

Orwell marked out the sado-masochism of the dictators’ rule. The sadism of the ruler: the masochism of the ruled. Yet he added love to it. Not only does the torturer need to be loved but he also ‘loves’ his victim object. There is more. The tormentor is not psychologically profound, the persecuted is. The problem is not that the species harvests so many who want to order but that there is a super-production of those who wish to obey. In the literature on business leadership there are about 3,000 titles: on followership, a handful. We still take for granted the urge to submit.

And submission – in Arabic, ‘Islam’ – remains a ubiquitous impulse in the political animal. As well as the refusal to recognize one’s own Janus face. For we all think that we stand for the good: liberals, socialists, communists, islamists. If I do not think that I am moral, my own inner conversation is irreparably divided against itself. Not only can my centre not hold, I do not even have one.

Orwell, in the semi-hysterical reaction of the left to Brexit and Trump’s presidency, has returned to the top of the best-seller lists. ‘1984’ rules. In the ever-so-slightly smug and definitely self-righteous response to the election of an Apprentice President, the left declares fascism imminent. Equality under the law has gone, a dark age beckons, all social norms discarded, I am the arbiter of the just. All bets are off and I fucking hate Big Brother. Let’s punch a Nazi.

Of course, Blair’s ‘1984’ was written just after the midnight in the twentieth century and it is suffused with the horror of one of the top 20 most destructive wars in history. How could it not reflect Eric’s awareness of human depravity?

Is Trump as depraved as Hitler and Stalin? Of course not. And nowhere near so: sooner or later, the left has to identify the spectrum of politicians with whom it disagrees. And to respond to them in a manner which does not mulishly and inaccurately lump them under the playground taunt of ‘fascist’. Remember, Lenin did differentiate between capitalists: why else write a pamphlet titled, ‘Left Wing Communism: an infantile disorder’, an uncharacteristically polite way of informing his followers of their relationship with guano and mental well-being?

Are we living in ‘1984’? No, we’re not, at least in the west. Culturally, the left has won, and enacted, all the moral arguments: the idea of equality under the law, the democratic impulse, respect for ideas – and those who propose them – in the public sphere, the irrelevance of one’s appearance or essence to the persuasiveness of your case. It’s over. In the future, the right might try, but will probably fail, to overturn that. In fact, a lot of the North European right agree with those ideas. In this sense, Orwell was wrong, but that is not what he was trying to forewarn in ‘1984’.

Most views of Orwell post-1945 see him as the voice of good old-fashioned, decent British common-sense socialism. His biographer, Taylor, as far as I recall, underplays his fascination, and intellectual argument, with the ex-Trotskyists Burnham and Shachtmann. In 1946, Orwell reviewed Burnham’s theories a mere 6 years after this conversation: in 1940 Hitler asked the Norwegian ambassador who he thought would win the war. The brave legate replied, “Trotsky”.

Orwell’s intellectual atmosphere reeked under Trotsky’s miasma: that’s why ‘Animal Farm’ and ‘1984’ are a conversation with, and, frankly, apology for Snowball/ Goldstein/Bronstein/Trotsky who could write like Shakespeare but act like Richard III.

Natheless, we all know that Orwell was a morally serious person: and so was Trotsky. One cannot possibly say the same about huge swathes of the modern left.

The most egregious example is the Second Iraq War. It was trivially simple to oppose it. The sole argument against it was the possibility of a bad outcome: which one can say about any war. The left – and it was the left in general – opposed it on the basis that it was imperialist, mainly because they, irrelevantly, thought that Dubya was a klutz: exactly how most British workers thought of Winston Churchill in 1939.

The 2nd Iraq war was obviously not an imperialist war and it differs from most other US interventions in that it attempted to, and did, install democracy in Iraq. The western left has utterly failed to notice this, preferring instead to focus on the trivial issue of George Bush’s rhetorical skills. That war ended disastrously, largely because of Bush’s hopeless Stage IV planning, and Saint Barack Obama’s withdrawal of American troops from the nascent Iraqi democracy.

If I were to turn the mulish leftist allegation-filled mind-set on its head, I’d point out that Obama left Iraqis to stand up for their own democracy. Let’s give Iraq 6 years to build a functioning democracy. While the US, 72 years after WWII and stationing troops in their countries, can’t rely on the Germans and Japanese to guarantee their own. This looks like US anti-white and anti-those-damned-clever-East-Asians racism. Any consistent western leftist might consider calling that racism – and they would still be wrong. Of course it ain’t true, but the thought could never even cross the mind of the bubble-primed modern western leftist desperate to spot US racism against a brownish Middle Eastern person.

Now we are left with the collapse of confidence in universal human values, largely as a result of the anti-Iraq war critique by the western left. What is noticeable is those critiques’ massive ignorance of the nature of Saddam’s régime. Largely, the left does not know anything about, or refuses to acknowledge its unfamiliarity with, Iraq 2003. And that is precisely the point that Orwell made about the USSR in 1948.

Of course, the big problem is that leftists think that any western intervention anywhere is immediately bad. Iraq is the go-to example. They fail to observe that Obama, by prematurely withdrawing US troops, sabotaged any possible good outcome in Iraq. They allege that the lesson is that the west – and the UN, which has played possum for 2 decades – should not intervene anywhere.

The word ‘Iraq’ is a short-hand for the unnecessary prosecution of a fight which should never have been started: it has become axiomatically the definition of a bad outcome. Yet, look at the statistics on Iraqi deaths pre- and post-2003. Saddam Hussein’s murderous efficiency makes IS look like amateurs. It outperforms IS by a magnitude of 10s or 100s.

As one tweeter expressed it, the left is suffering from “the awful ripple effects from the stigmatization of the Iraq intervention…” and particularly from its refusal to face Obama’s disastrous Middle East policy: his enabling of the growth of Iranian Shi’a theocracy and Ba’athist rule-by-torture.

In the short term this refusal by large swathes of the left has become a type of decadent grande bouffe at which it eats itself. Turn insular and isolationist and identify an identity from which you can indulge yourself in telling off the members of another group whose ideas, contrary to the rigour-free claims of your own ideology, you present as biologically determined: all white men are the same.

More seriously, in the medium and long term, the western left must take up a rigorous analysis of the Iraq war and its aftermath. I only see it being done to any extent in the security analysis sphere, among whom the facts really matter. We have a catastrophic long-term effect: the tiresome knee-jerk short-hand of ‘Iraq’ – all of it – being the definition of predictable failure.

If universal human rights are not worth defending everywhere and we become obsessed by who can have a dump where, this is the trivialisation of the left. This is how the useless western leftists – as Lenin said, useful idiots – enable theocracies, genocidalists and kleptocrats to determine the world order for the next generation. Because they have retreated from any beliefs without borders not even into the boudoir, but to the bathroom. And they are reduced to scuttling around in New York sucker-punching obscure, irrelevant and ineffective neo-Nazis like Richard Spencer and claiming world-historical class victory through a righteous clocking. How low and pathetically thuggish.

In some mood of exasperation, Marx once exclaimed, “Then I am not a Marxist.” In a zeitgeist where western leftist leaders openly excuse Islamo-fascists and others wibble on about punching right-wingers they don’t like, I know how he felt.

We, the people of Birmingham in England, ask the world to save us. Theresa May’s régime barrel-bombs our houses, our streets are rubble: her helicopters destroy our hospitals. These are our last moments. This is our last testament.

There is no way out. Our roads are cut off. May’s army, backed by US military might, and the militias of nine Western European countries have forced their way in to ninety per cent of the city. Dismembered bodies lie everywhere, limbs scattered, heads off, blood awash. Our heroic St. John’s Ambulance people describe it as ‘hell’. They have lost count of the dead.

We have rebels and internal refugee civilians kettled in to 2 square kilometres of our ruined city. We await our death. The régime is murdering the men who leave: they accuse them of terrorism. May’s rape-and-death squads violate our women, they go among the refugees to pick out pro-democracy leaders.

The US planes bomb our suburbs, the régime drops chlorine gas on us, we flee to cower in bunkers. Our children wail in dust and dried blood. They don’t understand. They have no food. We have no medicine. We have nothing to give them.

We call again on the UN, on anyone, to help our women and children get out. They must live. We have asked for this aid for five years. There has always been too little. President Putin, we wanted you to protect us: it was always too little. Now you say not a word as we see the end. Have you given up on us?

We face our midnight and close our eyes. This is our witness to those who closed theirs.

Jeremy Corbyn is a womble. He recycles speeches rejected by the 5 Labour leaders since Kinnock. The current US Vice-President Joe Biden notoriously borrowed word for word from a speech of Neil Kinnock. Corbyn, rummaging in the former Labour leader’s bin, plagiarized his cast-offs. Any old rubbish will do for Jeremy.

Yet that speech, from the 2015 Labour Conference, also contained Jeremy’s stirring call-to-arms for a kinder, gentler politics.

Let’s see how that worked out. How do his followers, cult-like in their idolization of the worst speaker in British politics – reminiscent of Trotsky’s aghast opinion of the mundane Stalin – respond to criticism of the honest and principled JC?

From the Jeremy Corbyn for PM Facebook page, 01-07-16.

MR: And if he’s bullied into resignation, how many of us will leave? I know I will…I could never support a party of backstabbers, liars and bullies.

SLHB: Deselect all those self-serving MPs who stabbed him in the back and hold by-elections in every constituency.

RDH: Another Murdoch parrot.

JG: You’re clearly very stupid, right-wing or racist or all of these.

BS: They (the PLP) are just a bunch of scheming bullies. Put up your candidate or crawl back into the shadows.

LT: First thing you do is get rid of all those backstabbing ministers.

PC: Behind you all the way Jeremy Corbyn, you can lead us out of this conspiratorial mess, keep going!

BQ: JR been trolling this page for days ………….That is an absolutely DISGUSTINGLY LOW DIG !!! Admin of the page need to remove this person !!!

JW: Traitor Eagle…

JW: lets get rid of the traitors now!

RM: Paxman is a tosspot.

GW: If you could come out of the fantasy place that you are and make a viable statement, maybe just maybe you could learn something. Until then keep quiet.

GJ: Why don’t you just run along and post on the UKIP, or other ultra-right wing pages where your comments will be appreciated?

Jeremy Corbyn, a man fit to be a Secretary of a rural parish council, who signs his own apples, who declares, “I am not a personality”. A leader tongue-tied during PMQs at the answers to his own questions: the Don Quixote, Oblomov, Charles Pooter, Chauncey Gardiner and Alan Partridge of the Labour Party; a man who permanently gives the impression of living behind a gauze of disengagement; a man who subtracts from the energy in a room by entering it; a man who exudes his deep unhappiness at the job he is in; a man who claims a kinder, gentler politics while his acolytes hurl abuse around worthy of Mao’s cultural revolution; a man happier holding a placard rather than a debate.

Yet a man with a reputation for honesty, sincerity and integrity.

The ‘Socialist’ whose surgery is in an Islamist mosque; the ‘leftist’ who supports the murdering IRA: who calls the genocidal anti-Semites Hamas his friends; and Hezbollah, the trainers of al-Qaeda in suicide bomb techniques; the man who thinks that the death of Osama bin Laden is morally equivalent to the murder of 3,000 people in 9/11; the man who works for Iranian Press TV; the man who celebrates the Khomeiniist regime at rallies (below); the man who defends Suliman Gani, the supporter of al-Qaeda; the man who responds to a caller proposing the killing of all Jews “Thank you for your call”; the man who fills in for George Galloway, the Saddam-worshipper, on Russian state-propaganda TV; the man who itched to oppose the first Gulf War after the UN had voted for it and after Saddam had bombed Israel and Saudi Arabia and annexed Kuwait; the man who dares to set up Stop the War and oleaginously imply that he is a pacifist; the man whose StW says nothing about the continuing genocide in Syria by Assad backed by Russia and Iran; the man whose StW organization publishes rabidly anti-Semitic posts and then deletes them as if they had never happened; the man who, on having his Labour Party exposed as secreting crazed anti-Semites, sets up an inquiry to root out the nonsensical Islamist meme ‘Islamophobia’ in the party; the man who surrounds himself with dumb posh boys flirting with the most repulsive régimes on the planet; North Korea, the USSR, Iran, Syria, Gaza; people who are so supine and incompetent that they can’t even be bothered responding to daily political events; and whose animus against the MSM is so great that they prefer to snapchat among themselves rather than engage.

Honest, sincere, honourable, competent?

None of the above: it’s time we moved into the post-Corbyn Labour Party era.